21 February 2009

Family gatherings and other unrelated travel.

Tomorrow I'm going skiing in Virginia. We meet at 5 am, and the bus rolls out at 5:30, to get up there around 9, where we ski all day and get back into the bus at like 5 pm and come home. Of course, there's supposed to be some icky weather in the morning, so the ride up will probably take longer than advertised.

Tonight I'm meeting a friend for dinner. She lives out in Asheville, so I don't get to see her often.

Ever since the pound has gone down vs the dollar, I've been thinking, "Hey, maybe I could go to England, since it's not stupidly expensive, only rest-of-Europe expensive." So when Ben off-hand commented that we could go for our anniversary, I was kind of shocked, since he normally doesn't make suggestions like that, and wondered if he meant it, so I could kill time at work by looking stuff up on the internet. I poked around a bit, and tickets are stupidly expensive, plus hotel and food and transportation... gets up there.

Also, I'd forgotten the summer thing his mom wanted us to go to out in Oregon. And my vacation time budget can't afford that much travel. (Annoyingly, my employer doesn't send out pay stubs, and we can only access the remuneration statements from work, so I can't check and see if it even shows my leave accrual rate.)

So an anniversary whatever will likely wind up being a weekend getaway to Asheville.

Between my planned con travel (3 days), this family thing (2 days), and whatever we decide to do for our anniversary (1 day?), I'll be using much of my allotted time, which is currently 41 hours, then the 45 or so I'll earn between now and September, which equals about 11 days vacation. (My employer says full time is 37.5 hours.)

Annoyingly, this get-together will be the weekend before the annual beach trip, and because of work and the fact that I was just off the previous Friday and that Monday, I'll have to work till 5 and drive out to the beach after that, not getting there until long after dinner. Which sucks, because the best part of the beach is the food. And the annual Friday night beach walk. (Assuming we can be enough of a voice to have it the 2nd weekend in August, anyway.)

So we'll save up my vacation hours and take a longer trip to Europe for anniversary #10. Maybe a Danube cruise, or just a several-city self-guided tour of the Habsburg empire (Vienna, Budapest, places in between). There's plenty of time to plan for that, though.

2 comments:

Kelly said...

You have a very entertaining blog! I'm glad I came across it.

If you are looking for place to stay for your anniversary in Asheville, you may be interested in Carolina Mornings vacation rentals. We hope to hear from you :)

Take care!
Kelly

Carolina Mornings: Discover Asheville Blog
http://carolinamornings.blogspot.com

Vacation Rentals
http://www.carolinamornings.com

CD Covington said...

Hi Kelly! Thanks for your links! We're looking at B&B-type places rather than cabins or condos, but if we ever need something like that, I'll definitely keep you in mind :)